Understanding Groups for Admins - The 2 types: School Groups vs Parent Interest Groups

The Classlist groups system allows parents & admins to communicate with a relevant audience for each message. Posts, comments, events or announcements can be shared to a specific group. The 2 types of group are:

• automatically-populated school groups (year/class/ambassadors & reps)
• bespoke parent interest groups.

Whenever you post any content (or send an announcement or create a community event etc) you can select which group your message is addressed to.

Find out about joining, creating and managing groups. 

In this article 

School groups
Parent Interest groups
Ambassadors & Reps group
Sharing a group
Your group
Benefits of Groups

School Groups (years and classes)

School Groups are automatically generated by Classlist and reflect your school's individual structure of Years and Classes (as defined on the School Structure page). Each member is placed into their personal Year and Class groups based on which classes their children are in. Parents with multiple children will be in multiple School Groups.

Making Changes

Integrated Schools - If you are at an integrated school the structure will be set to follow your MIS data - changes to the MIS class/year structure will update the school structure in Classlist.

Parents - at non-integrated schools, parents will be able to edit their child's class on their profile if they discover they are in the wrong class/year group. The members of the new class that they are joining will be notified so they can welcome them. We recommend that parents don't change classes themself near the annual move up time.

Ambassadors & Staff Plus users - can add, edit or delete the groups associated with years and classes by changing the School Structure - the groups will automatically be updated. 

NB: for ambassadors, the Groups page in admin mode is only for monitoring content. If you need to change the name/membership of a school group you need to be in the School Structure page in admin mode, or for integrated schools this should be done in your MIS platform. Parent interest groups can be viewed and deleted on the admin side but name/membership changes will need to be done on the parent side. For closed groups this will need to be done by the group owner.

Parent Interest Groups

Parent interest groups can be created by parents and admins on the parent side rather than being automatically generated. Staff Admins can also do this on the admin side eg for a school trip, but must assign a group owner who has access to the parent side.

They can be either:

• open - anyone can join
• closed parents wanting to join have to be approved by the group's owner

The group owner can change the status of a group from open to closed or vice versa if they need to.

Parents can create groups themselves and add individual parents or classes. This allows parents to communicate around a shared interest even if their children are in different School Groups. 

Parent Interest Groups may be created for all sorts of purposes, eg music clubs, sports teams, social groups, book clubs, pub quiz teams or school trips.

Group owners, Ambassadors and Staff Admin Plus users can add, approve or remove members or delete the group. Click here for more information on managing groups.

The names of all parent groups can be seen by any parent, whether they are open or closed groups.  This is because they are for community building as such the title should not need to be secret!

Ambassadors & Reps Group

All Admin members are automatically placed in the Ambassadors and Reps Group: if you do not have an admin account you will not see this group.  If you were an admin but no longer have admin status you will automatically be removed from the Ambassadors and Reps group.

Sharing a group

You can share a link to a group to promote it and get people to join, or you can add members manually.

Desktop - To share a link, take the url from the parent side on desktop. You can get to it by opening the group and clicking the 3 dots menu at the top right and selecting 'group info'. The url should be in the format https://app.classlist.com/parent/#/groups/view/??? with a list of numbers at the end. This can be pasted into a post so parents can easily see it and join.

Mobile - we will be adding a share button - coming soon.

Your Groups 

The 'my groups' tab on the parent side (top of the home page) will show you a list of your groups. You will see a different set of groups to other members, because the list is personalised according to which ones you belong to. Groups are listed in order of latest activity.

You will see both the class and year school groups which your children belong to as well as any parent interest groups that you have been added to or signed up to.

Benefits of the Groups feature

The Groups feature means you can post things which are only applicable to that particular group, without bothering the parents in the rest of the school (ie in the example below, the homework is only relevant to parents with children in class 11SS). No more endless notifications about stuff you are not interested in! 

You can also see more information about the group and find out who else is a member or who the group owners are.